RG Saturday 14th January 2012

The meeting began with the Chairman presenting certificates to our 6 new members.

The Richmond Group’s 30+ members attending were treated to two excellent seminars by our three guest speakers.

Consulting in the Middle market

Sally Scott of Advanced Business Solutions, a £100m turnover business offering business focused IT solutions to mid cap organisations began by highlighting the “forgotten army”. These were the £50-£300m turnover business with were not well served by external consultants.
She explained that there are great opportunities for independent consultants such as those in the Richmond Group,
to work with them to better serve this important market.

Sally’s company commissioned two pieces of research led by Fiona Czernlawska of Source for Consulting, to identify where these opportunities are and how best they could be exploited.
These ogranisations suffer greatly with poorly designed processes and inefficient legacy systems.
The research was summarsied and showed that there are silo practices, over complexity in their processes, and communication breakdowns which lead to barriers to growth.

Sally reiterated the opportunities for the RG to work with them and stated there is cost involved and asked those interested to register their details on their dedicated portal "consulting connect."
This was received positively and was agreed the next steps will be for a consortium of RG to meet with Advanced Business Solutions to explore this further and report back to the membership as a whole.

Diversity – a tool for organisational growth

Liz Kennedy a well respected consultant and academic presented a very lively and interactive discussion on diversity in the workplace.
Liz covered the legislation which has taken place from 1943 to the Equality Act 2010. This Act was the first to introduce “discrimination by perception”
Members cited their own experiences of discrimination including what sounds now (but not at the time), very comical anecdotes.
Throughout her presentation Liz made the argument that not only is it right to treat everyone fairly, it also makes business sense, not least in improving morale and enabling innovative thinking.
Poor practices on the other hand create a potentially destructive and ineffective work force where effort can be withdrawn.
To put this in context Liz outlined business cases on both good and poor diversity practice.
She cited that whilst the “male, stale and pale” contingent holds on to board room power, women representation has risen to 15%, but argued there is some way to catch up with Norway’s 40%.